It all started on a typical Maui fall day, with beautiful trade winds and sunny
skies over the Kapalua Golf Course. Tom Stokes* and his wife Teresa* were about to
start the ninth hole when Tom had to go to the bathroom.

"I was standing over the urinal and noticed blood in my
urine," Stokes says.

Confused as to what he should do, Stokes decided to just finish playing golf
without mentioning anything to his wife.

"Needless to say, I didn't have a good score from that point on," he says.

Back at the hotel he was still urinating blood, but decided it could wait until
he returned home to California the following day.

"There were no other symptoms," he says. "No pain, no other indications."

Stokes' stone was so big it couldn't pass from the kidney to the ureter (the
tube from the kidney to the bladder). The stone was approximately 8 mm,
while the average inner diameter of the ureter is 4 mm.

Stokes' doctor scheduled a lithotripsy, a
treatment where shock waves are used to break up the large stone into smaller
pieces that can then pass through the urinary system.